Two centuries after the emergence of steam technologies and 170 years after initial suggestions that the atmosphere keeps Earth warm, scientists proved human disturbance of the Earth's carbon budget changes the world's climate. The work and timescales of making and knowing are decisively interrelated, yet still too little is understood about critical links between how imperial and global energy infrastructures have re-made climate and how scientists have known climate.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2019 to 2024, Making Climate History maps largely unexamined connexions between histories of places, personnel, materials and power during the period that made and recognised both a global physics and a global climate.